By Mark Berman
The Washington Post - June 2, 2014
The Supreme Court declined to step in Monday on
behalf of James Risen, a New York Times reporter and author who faces
potential jail time for not identifying a source.
So what does this mean for Risen’s case? Will the Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporter be sent to prison? What does he have to say about
the decision? And how does this fit into the Obama administration’s war
on leaks? Here’s a primer on what is going on, where things stand and
what could happen next.
Who is James Risen?
Risen is a reporter for the New York Times who writes about national security issues. In 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize for
his stories about the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping
program. He continues to write about national security, and published a front-page story Sunday
about how the National Security Agency is intercepting massive numbers
of images shared to social media platforms to use in facial recognition
programs. (This story, written with Laura Poitras, was based on
documents obtained by Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor who
leaked a trove of classified information to journalists.)
Why is he facing jail time in the first place?
Risen is the author of the 2006 book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.”
A chapter of that book detailed a CIA plan to sabotage Iran’s nuclear
program. Prosecutors believe that Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central
Intelligence Agency operative charged with leaking classified information, gave Risen information that was used for this chapter.
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